Field of the Invention
This application relates to sorting and more particularly to sorting using analog signals.
Description of the Related Art
The widely accepted value for the minimum number of comparison operations to sort a large list of N items is N log 2(N). A very large list of one billion items, for example, requires roughly 30 billion comparisons. Each of those comparisons can also require many clock cycles of the computing system. 30 billion comparisons might actually take 300 billion clocked operations. In Big Data analytics, weather prediction, nuclear calculations, astrophysics, genetics, public health, and many other disciplines, there is a frequent need to sort very large datasets. That suggests the need for computational resources that can literally fill buildings with racks of servers to perform such sorts. To the extent one can improve on this N log 2(N) limitation, one can improve on the capital infrastructure and associated operational costs for computing systems.